God Has A Sense Of Humor
In Neurifact, my main character, Dr. Nate Walters, meets every Monday morning for breakfast, with his pastor, Rev/Dr Murray Phillips, and a psychiatrist friend, Dr., Ed Fellows. These three comically refer to their group as the Miniature Trinity, or Mini-Trini for short. In their humorous roles, Nate (the engineer) is God, Murray (the pastor) is Jesus, and Ed (the psychiatrist) is the Holy Spirit.
One of my Christian engineer friends who reviewed my draft of Neurifact thought that my titling of this group was a little too sacrilegious by mis-assigning the title, trinity. My characters do not presume to portray themselves as belonging to any higher religious order, but poke a little fun at each other about their respective pseudo-titles. I think it helps to carry the story along and contributes some useful scriptural foundation for the plot along with a little dose of humor.
I believe that God has a sense of humor and occasionally allows it in scripture to emphasize a point. I especially like the way God supported Elijah in his taunting monolog to the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel. Elijah had challenged King Ahab’s 450 prophets of their god, Baal, to prepare an altar with a sacrificial bull on it and then pray to Baal to call down fire on the altar. After praying until noon with no response from Baal, Elijah taunted them in 1st Kings 18:27.
27 And at noon Elijah mocked them, saying, “Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.â€
Elijah enjoyed poking fun at these Baal priests, possibly more than watching God defeat them by bringing fire to his altar.
So, I’m fairly optimistic God is not going to strike me down with a lightning bolt for using the term “Mini-Trini†throughout Neurifact for three of my characters as they attempt to understand “Perryâ€, an AI analytical tool that ventures into the scripture and theology domain to explain some unusual brain wave activity in my F-35C fighter pilot.
I did have a personal event in 1974, where perhaps God was humorously taunting me with a lightning bolt. I have the date on record in my logbook as Saturday 23 February 1974, the Saturday before Fat Tuesday in New Orleans. As is often the case near the end of a short month, the squadron needed to log more total flight hours on the last weekend so cross-country flights were readily available to bag 10 or more hours. My pilot, Captain Hal Baker and I flew two legs in EA-6A Bureau Number 156983 on Friday from MCAS Cherry Point, NC to MacDill AFB in Tampa and logged 6.4 hours. We thought it would be nice to spend Saturday night at NAS New Orleans and take in some Mardi Gras revelry, but you couldn’t spend the night at the air station without a “Prior Permission Required†(PPR) number and the limited available PPR numbers had been dispensed months ahead of Marti Gras. But you could fly in and park for the day as long as you were gone by midnight.
So Hal and I got up early Saturday, flew a high-speed / low level mission in Florida into the Lake George bombing range and then jumped up on the Jet Airways and flew into NAS New Orleans, landing at 8 AM. We refueled and parked the EA-6A on the transient line, changed clothes, and caught a taxi to the French Quarter. From about 10 AM to 6 PM we had two nice meals, took in a couple of parades, enjoyed the scenery, and collected a few bead sets. We did not engage in any sinful activity and with the 12-hour-bottle-to-throttle rule we did not drink any alcohol, but perhaps we were a little frivolous with the taxpayer dollars by flying a “training mission†to Mardi Gras in an expensive tactical aircraft. We caught a taxi back to NAS New Orleans, filed our flight plan and were airborne by 9 PM.
There was some frontal weather in north Georgia that we were vectored around and we saw a lot of lightning off to our right. My G-suit and torso harness had my flight suit pretty tight to my body, but suddenly all the hair on my arms and the back of my neck below my helmet stood up noticeably. About a second later, there was a bright flash and an audible sound even within my helmet as lightning struck our aircraft. Instantly the bright white battery-powered thunderstorm lights came on since our generators were tripped offline and several circuit breakers popped. Hal quickly reset the generators and checked the engines, controls, and instruments and the airplane was flying fine. We reset all the circuit breakers and then extinguished the thunderstorm lights. I recall I had a set of green Mardi Gras beads that had been tossed to me by a beautiful lady on a float, draped over the thunderstorm light on the canopy rail and they really shone in the bright light. We left the thunderstorm area and had an otherwise uneventful flight back to Cherry Point, logging 12.9 hours in 2 days.
After it was over, I thought perhaps God was snickering a bit at having put a little fear into a partying aircrew at 33K Ft over Georgia. And after we were safely on the ground with only a little charring on the tail cap of our EA-6A, I have to admit; we laughed a bit.
So enjoy God’s sense of humor if you ever bear witness to it. But in the meantime, if you’re outside on a dark cloudy day and feel every hair on your body standing up, I’d recommend you quickly get on the ground and curl up into a fetal position. God may lob a lightning bolt into your area. And enjoy safely reading about the Mini-Trini in Neurifact.